Tuesday, August 08, 2017

incantation and writing

Generally, I am on the side of
Tim Ingold – who is on the side, mostly, of Derrida – in his book, Lines. In
some ways, Ingold reproduces the grammatological gesture of the early Derrida.
For instance, Inglold, too, devotes time to a lesson in writing. The scene of
writing in Lines is derived not from Levi-Strauss, however, but, more
Englishly, from Winnie the Pooh.

“Eeyore, the old grey donkey, has arranged
three sticks on the ground. Two of the sticks were almost touching at one end
but splayed apart at the other, while the third was laid across them. Up comes
Piglet. ‘Do you know what that is?’, Eeyore asks Piglet. Piglet has no idea.
‘It’s an A’, intones Eeyore proudly. By recognizing the ﬁgure as an A, however,
would we be justiﬁed in crediting Eeyore with having produced an artefact of
writing? Surely not. All he has done is to copy a ﬁgure he has seen somewhere
else. He knows it is an A because that is what Christopher Robin called it. And
he is convinced that to recognize an A when you see one is of the essence of
Learning and Education. But Christopher Robin, who is starting school, knows
better. He realizes that A is a letter, and that as such it is just one of a
set of letters, called the alphabet, each of which has a name, and that he has
learned to recite in a given order. He is also learning to draw these letters.
But at what stage does he cease to draw letters and begin instead to write? “

This question hovers very much over any
contemporary family with a child in pre-school. Adam has spent the last year in
a fight with the number 5. It is a number that, he claims, he can’t draw. It is
a curious problem, since he can draw 3 and even the difficult 4. But 5 in
Adam’s hands tends to turn into 3.

Ingold considers the answers produced by the question of the drawing/writing
divide (which one notices in the Pooh example almost fatally puts into motion
the various hierarchical divides – of human vs. animal, of the schooled
(literate) vs. the unschooled, or savage, of the scission between the
preschooled child and the child who is “starting school” – that play out in the
last 500 years of history) and goes through the various classificatory
responses that attempt to sort out what is going on. There is the difference he
starts out with, deriving from Nelson Goodman, between script and score (“The
script, he argues, is a work, whereas in the case of the score the work
comprises the set of performances compliant with it.“) He considers Vygotsky’s
idea that children, making their first letters or numbers, ‘do not draw, they
indicate, and the pencil merely ﬁxes the indicatory gesture.” And finally he
considers Roy Harris’s argument that the difference between notation and
spelling signifies a cardinal epistemological shift.
Ingold, however, wants to argue that whatever shift is indicated by the
difference between Christopher Robin and Eeyore’s view of “A”, spelling or
writing is still a special kind of drawing.

Adam’s problem with 5 is not a problem with its place in the number system. He
knows how to count to ten – and even to one hundred, when singing the song
about counting to one hundred. But I would emphasize something different than
indication or spelling. I would emphasize incantation.

To my mind, Adam’s knowledge of counting to ten is incantatory knowledge. This
doesn’t mean he can’t apply it. He loves, in fact, to count things. Holes in
shoes that shoestrings go through. Fingers. The number of pancake pieces on his
plate that he has to finish. But these numerating instances are, I think,
incantatory instances as well.

Charms with incantations written on them are pretty common objects in the
archaeology of the Eastern Mediterranean and Middle East. Incantations are
generally taken to be nonsense words, formulas that do not correspond to words
or phrases that make sense in the language in which they appear. For the
Greeks, they were part of the repertoire of medicine. In one of Pindar’s poems,
Aesclepius uses incantations, pharmaka (drugs) or pharmaka (charms) to heal
patients. The classical scholar Roy Kotansky quotes a text by Cato which
recommends healing a fractured bone not only by binding the area with bandages,
but also by binding a broken reed at the same time, waving about a knife, and
uttering the phrase Motas Vaeta Daries Dardares Astataries Dissunapiter. This
phrase is “nonsensical” – the equivalent of abracadabra.

But it is a mistake to claim that the nonsense has no larger sense. Incantatory
phrases are handed down. They are written. They are remembered. They are
formulaic. But the reference of the word or words that form the incantation is
not on the normal route to denotation. It is hip hopping down another road, a
backroad.

I’m not sure that viewing the 5 as an incantatory object is going to solve
Adam’s problem. That will be solved mechanically as he keeps going to school.
But it does shed some light on the way children pick up on phrases, and will
repeat them for the joy of the phrase. Which later on becomes part of the
reception or creation of verbal art.

One more story from Ingold.

“In some cases, the elements of a notation are clearly also depictions. That
the ox-head hieroglyph, the precursor of our letter A, is a depiction becomes
obvious if we compare it with the way oxen themselves were drawn in Ancient
Egypt (Figure 5.4). We would not hesitate to say that the glyph is a drawing of
something other than itself, even though it is also incorporated into a script.
Another well-known example may be taken from recent ethnography. I refer to
Nancy Munn’s (1973b) celebrated study of the Walbiri, an Aboriginal people of
the Central Australian Desert whom we have already encountered, in passing, in
Chapter 3. Both men and women among the Walbiri routinely draw designs in the
sand with their ﬁngers, as they talk and tell stories. This drawing is as
normal and as integral a part of conversation as are speech and gesture. The
markings themselves are standardized to the extent that they add up to a kind
of vocabulary of graphic elements whose precise meanings, however, are heavily
dependent on the conversational or storytelling contexts in which they appear.
Thus a simple straight line can be (among other things) a spear, a ﬁghting or
digging stick, or a person or animal lying stretched out; a circle can be a
nest, water hole, tree, hill, billy can or egg. As the story proceeds, marks
are assembled into little scenes, each of which is then wiped out to make way
for the next (Munn 1973b: 64–73).”

About Me

MANY YEARS LATER as he faced the firing squad, Roger Gathman was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover
ice. Or rather, to discover the profit making potential of selling bags of ice to picnicking Atlantans, the most glorious of the old man's Get Rich schemes, the one that devoured the most energy, the one that seemed so rational for a time, the one that, like all the others - the farm, the housebuilding business, the plastic sign business, chimney cleaning, well drilling, candy machine renting - was drawn by an inexorable black hole that opened up between skill and lack of business sense, imagination and macro-economics, to blow a huge hole in the family savings account. But before discovering the ice machine at 12, Roger had discovered many other things - for instance, he had a distinct memory of learning how to tie his shoes. It was in the big colonial, a house in the Syracuse metro area that had been built to sell and that stubbornly wouldn't - hence, the family had moved into it. He remembered bending over the shoes, he remembered that clumsy feeling in his hands - clumsiness, for the first time, had a habitation, it was made up of this obscure machine, the shoe, and it presaged a lifetime of struggle with machine after machine.